13/03/2017

Sometimes technology scares me. With one bank now allowing customers to make payments using voice recognition, I have to be careful. My voice is broadcast everyday so I have to be sure I don't use the words “all”, “transfer”, “money” and “my”in case someone records them and splices them together in a different order.

Technology is getting so advanced you either need a PhD to understand it be 8 years old. So it's nice to see something slowing the pace down. The Nokia 3310 is coming back this year.

If you don't remember it, the 3310 was a mobile phone that was the size of an overgrown highlighter pen and it was packed with features. With this phone you could “phone” someone. It's a strange concept to users of smartphones who use an internet app to live call someone using their phone, but back in the 1970s, probably, the Nokia 3310 would act like a phone allowing you to call someone directly using their phone number.

It didn't end there. You could send text messages, but you didn't have to use a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook you could send the message right from the phone. I know, it's shocking, but it was the 1920s or something, so times were different.

Back then SMS messages, as they were called, were limited to 160 characters, which made life so much easier. People couldn't go on and on. You don't need more characters than that. Donald Trump is governing a nation using Twitter and that's only 140.

And the 3310 had a battery life of 55 hours. Young people don't understand these things. They don't know what a landline is. “It's a phone that's plugged into the wall,” you tell them, but with the constant need to be charged, you've just described their iPhone.